5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy

John Jantsch ( 00: 02.039 )

Hello and welcome to the newest episode of the Duck Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m putting on a new solo show. Kind of on a rant here about new SEO. SEO is still alive. The old playbook is dead. SEO is still a very, very reliable channel. We just have to think about it completely differently. So I want to talk about a tool in this episode of this series about the new SEO, and I know that this is going to…

For some people, this is going to be hard and dry and boring, but trust me, I’ll first off try to make it not boring, but also secondly, this is important. You need to pay attention to this because a lot of the reporting you receive or that agencies provide doesn’t really tell you much, which is one of the challenges in SEO. It maybe tells you rankings or some movement and keywords, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do.

And if you know how to mine it, how to actually improve intent, and how to improve click through the things that are going to actually lead to conversion, the Google search console is actually the tool that tells you what to do. And let’s face it, that’s the point of all of this, right? Some of you old schoolers, you’ve been listening to me for a long time. Remember that this data that’s in Google search console used to be in Google analytics.

We used to be able to see what searches we were ranking for and how much traffic each of these searches was generating. Now that’s just a big, nothing. They removed it all from there, not even telling you what you do. But it still lives in Google search console. Therefore, I believe it to be one of the least and most underappreciated tools. And here’s the beauty, it’s free. There are numerous tools built from this that cost$ 199 per month to build.

If you just figure out how to actually tweak it and use it, it is a tool that can give you even better data, can inform decisions going forward so that you can improve your conversion, improve your business. So I’m going to go over five different ways that you might be using the Google search console. And don’t worry if you’re listening to this and you’re like, my head hurts. I’m not interested in learning more about a tool. This is something that we do as part of our

John Jantsch ( 02: 24. 79 )

Strategy first engagements as part of building a search visibility system rather than SEO. SVS search visibility is what I’m calling because that’s what really matters. That tool or that system is something that we can do for you. So, be careful not. If you hear something today, you’re like, that’s brilliant. I’m not going to do it. Just contact us, Duct Tape Marketing, and we will help you find the answers to making this work for you. So use, number one.

Google Search Console to discover intent and content opportunities. So you need to first of all understand what people are actually searching for when they visit your website, and then you can align your future content with those real queries. So there are a number of sections in Google Search Console. I won’t be doing a tutorial, and I want to concentrate on the things you can do today that I believe you can do. But one of the sections is called performance. So if you attend a performance,

search results queries, you’re going to be able to filter in pages, filter your pages that have impressions, but low click through rate. These are the only things listed there. It’ll be very obvious to you what those are. It displays the number of views that page received over the past era. But it also shows you the percentage of the people that saw that page that clicked on it. So it displays the content you’re looking for but doesn’t convert.

And often that means because your title or your metadata or maybe the content itself showed up for Google interpreted the intent, but the user didn’t think that it meant what they were searching for. It simply, in essence, just gives you a roadmap to things you should be improving. You’re already showing up for those. You now know how to make that better, but how? You can mine for long tail searches. People today have become extremely good at searching, which is one of the things I find to be true.

Exactly what they want. Because you can turn a book into AI and it will produce the results, AI is making this even worse. But people are doing longer searches, these very detailed searches. They frequently, in fact, almost always express their purpose in that search. And even though there may be very little volume for that, one of the things that I have found is sometimes when you look at pages that are getting traffic, what they’re ranking for, it might be 30 or 40 different search terms that you’re ranking for for that.

John Jantsch ( 04: 49. 102 )

page, there just isn’t much volume in it. Even if it’s 10 a month, the intention is so high that you start to really optimize your page for those with blog posts, FAQs, even Google business page Q&amp, As, you start to capture that in more places. And that’s high intent.

using Google to generate local and branded visibility signals. So one of the things that you want to be paying attention to is are there searches for your name, your competitors names, you know, plus reviews or plus type of service. And what that does is it reveals that people are attempting to validate various kinds of businesses. So you create branded FAQs around those searches.

testimonials, those that actually address those. So mine all of your reviews and look for, you know, put those on your website, getting those kind of search terms in there. Okay, I guess. Number three, use Google search console to measure the right metrics, not rankings, trust and visibility. So, stop ranking.

and think in terms of search visibility, click through rates, and your top converting pages. Therefore, I’m going to start promoting clients ‘ increased online presence as an agency. Because to me, rankings bounce around every time there’s some update to the algorithm because of the way people try to manipulate them. However, your overall popularity is expanding as are the number of queries that are ranked among the top 10 queries.

your average click through across all branded and non-branded terms. It really demonstrates how well your content in search engines earns users ‘ trust, and how quickly your brand impressions grow when you add new pages or sections. really overall presence, is something that, that, needs to be the new metric. Because of how much all of that add up to, it may sound a little fuzzy. but it’s the growth of it. I believe the key is in getting that number to go in the right direction.

John Jantsch ( 07: 15.854 )

Google Search Console can assist you with some technical problems. So indexing, crawlability issues, load time for your website. Therefore, you should definitely check out the pages Google excludes. Why? In some cases, you’ve instructed it to exclude those, but I’m finding that in many cases, they are unable to access entire pages or websites. You know, are there URLs that really

Are the incorrect URLs a sign that you have updated your website and given new names? mean, people do things like that all the time. Is the site map updated, and is mobile performance stable? That is a huge, huge one. I am aware that it is. They never tell you what the ranking factors are, but I, I, I’ve seen it myself every time a site slows down because we haven’t been paying attention or we haven’t updated something or they’ve uploaded, somebody’s uploaded a giant image that makes the homepage take forever to load.

rankings tank. there’s clearly a direct tie. Okay, the last one I want to discuss is.

Guiding Google Search Console will help guide your AI Content or at least your AI content optimization, right? So that you know, you can input data directly from Google Search Console into chat GPT and then type in the phrase “know based on these queries from Google Search Console Give them a list of your top ten, right help create content briefs that are useful for creating content briefs.”

that addresses these questions clearly and builds trust for a small business offering whatever service you offer. That kind of thing will give you such a head start when it comes to producing the right content, not just the right one. And that’s the best starting point. And yet again, I’ve only scratched the surface on what I believe are some of the key points that you should be focusing on with this incredibly underused tool.

John Jantsch ( 09: 21.538 )

This is a component of what we refer to as a search visibility system that we’ve developed as part of our client strategy work to help them really develop that entire content roadmap, to help them be focused on the right content, to really be focused on intent. And I think that that, if you take nothing else away from today, we need to be spending most of our content information around intent, around searches.

branded searches for the things people are looking clearly indicate that we can attest that they are trying to buy something. Spend our time and effort there on conversions. Don’t worry about traffic. Worry about visibility and overall impressions. Okay, I guess. That’s it for today. Again, John at ducttapemarketing.com is the only one to contact if you need any assistance or want to learn more. I’d love to show you what we do and hopefully,

Keep listening to the duct tape marketing podcast, where I’ll continue to discuss the new SEO, among other things, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.